Dementia Care Research and Psychosocial Factors

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Biomarker Research

Background:

• The Impact of Genetic Susceptibility Testing for Alzheimer's Disease (IGT-AD) instrument assesses psychological effects of learning genetic risk for AD.
• Identifying a cutoff score is vital for timely psychological intervention for individuals receiving AD test results.
• This study adapts the IGT-AD for non-genetic biomarker testing, specifically amyloid PET results.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine the optimal cutoff score for an adapted IGT-AD Distress subscale.
• To evaluate the predictive power of the adapted IGT-AD for identifying distress in cognitively symptomatic older adults undergoing biomarker testing.
• To establish a screening tool for psychological distress in individuals receiving AD biomarker results.

Main Methods:

• Adapted the IGT-AD by replacing genetic testing references with biomarker testing.
• Assessed 96 cognitively symptomatic participants using the adapted IGT-AD and the Impact of Event Scale (IES) as a gold standard.
• Utilized Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis and the Youden index to determine the optimal cutoff score and predictive accuracy (AUC).

Main Results:

• The optimal cutoff score for the adapted IGT-AD Distress subscale was 22.
• This cutoff achieved a sensitivity of 77.1% and specificity of 82.0%.
• The Area Under the Curve (AUC) was 0.86, indicating excellent predictive power for distress.

Conclusions:

• An adapted IGT-AD Distress subscale score above 22 effectively detects psychological distress in individuals receiving AD biomarker results.
• This cutoff score has practical applications for screening and early intervention in clinical and research settings.
• The findings support the use of the adapted instrument for identifying individuals needing psychological support after AD biomarker testing.